


The Vanish Zone

by Anonymous



Series: This Moment and Every Moment [2]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: (by which I mean 21st Century unfortunately), Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Past Rape/Non-con, Period-Typical Homophobia, Rape Aftermath, Rape Recovery, Thoughts about self-harm, past disordered eating
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-24
Updated: 2021-01-24
Packaged: 2021-03-10 07:21:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27699586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: He’s so tired. Of being gentle with himself, of giving himself time. Of all the helpful, exhausting little rituals that make it better but don’t make it go away. Of the distance between knowing the way home and actually being there.----Sequel toSomewhere in Mid-Air, because enough people said they wanted to see more of the recovery and I found I did too.  Nicky and Nile deal with the fallout.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Nicky | Nicolo di Genova & Nile Freeman
Series: This Moment and Every Moment [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2025752
Comments: 135
Kudos: 351
Collections: Anonymous





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a direct sequel (it starts literally a few hours later) but may be readable as a standalone fic if you at least read the summary of Somewhere in Mid-Air.
> 
> Please mind the tags. While the focus here is entirely on comfort and recovery, there are some brief but somewhat graphic memories of rape in Chapter 1.
> 
> The title comes from the invisible area above the screen in a game of Tetris. You'll see why.

When he wakes before dawn, there’s a moment when he doesn’t remember, a split second when he doesn’t know why the weight of the night is so heavy, why he feels the dark seeping in through his skin, collecting in a hollow behind his ribs.

Then he does remember. He stops breathing, his lungs clenching on air.

Joe’s arms are still warm around him, Joe’s sleeping face only inches away. Once, Nicky would have just lain there till morning, motionless so as not to wake him, staring into the dark, ashamed of the tears that spring to his eyes. Even now, he hesitates. But he knows what Joe would want him to do, what he would want Joe to do in his place.

He whispers, “Joe.”

It’s all it takes. Joe wakes uncharacteristically fast and completely. He lays a hand over Nicky’s cheek, and immediately, everything’s a little better.

“Were you dreaming?”

“No. I’m just – remembering. Now.”

“Oh, my love. Tell me.”

Nicky huddles into the shelter of Joe’s body as if he’s a wind-break. “You already know.”

Joe’s thumb strokes from his cheekbone to his temple. “You can tell me anyway.”

For a second, Nicky considers it.

_It hurt so much. They didn’t even use spit, Joe, just stabbed into me and tore me and if I couldn’t heal so fast God knows how long it would have taken; I’d have needed a hospital, stitches._

_Except I wouldn’t, because I’d be dead._

However willingly he’d bear it, it would hurt Joe so much more to hear than it would help Nicky to say it. And he doesn’t _need_ Joe to know it, not like he needed him to know that he’d hit himself, that it wasn’t safe for him to sleep with a gun within reach.

He breathes, “Just be with me, please.”

“Always.”

They lie there together. Nicky knots a hand into the front of Joe’s shirt and holds on, gasping softly as it continues, memory coursing through him like a current. The impact as they slammed him down on the table-top, unseen fingers hooking over the waistband of his trousers and dragging down, the air on his bared skin, and the _laughter_ , and then –

Joe presses a sudden, firm kiss against his forehead and whispers fiercely, “I’m not _leaving_ you there with them, not again.” He manages to roll over and reach for the light switch without breaking contact, keeping a hand on Nicky the whole time. Nicky winces, his eyes screwing shut against the sudden light. Joe sits up, pulling Nicky with him, and holds him tight.

“You know what happened. You can’t forget, but you don’t have to remember, not now, not like that.”

“Okay,” Nicky agrees, although he doesn’t really understand. Understanding seems, for the moment, both far too difficult and unimportant.

Another kiss lands on the crown of his head, and then Joe explodes into motion, rifling through their bags to find them shoes, coats. Nicky sits on the bed, blinking heavily, and doesn’t ask where they’re going or why. He’s tired, and confused, and that’s already a significant improvement. He draws the line at Joe actually putting his shoes on for him but he lets Joe steer him out, through the dark living room and into the night air.

There’s a dim streak of pewter above the wooded hills in the east, just enough that they can find their way. Joe takes his hand and leads him down the little gravel path through the wet grass. 

“Look,” Joe says. “There _is_ a lake.”

It’s barely more than a large pond, but there’s a little jetty, a rowing boat covered in tarpaulin moored beside it. Two coots break from the shelter of a willow as they approach, leaving a cross-hatched trail of ripples across the water, silver on black.

They stand on the jetty and Nicky watches Joe’s breath in the air, turning from white to gold as the dawn catches it.

“Beautiful,” Nicky says, and he shivers a little, but only because of the cold. They turn in towards each other again, the full length of Nicky’s body pressed to Joe’s. He rests his chin on Joe’s shoulder and slides his arms around him, his hands under Joe’s coat where it’s warm.

Unseen birds are beginning to wake in the trees. Joe lifts his head to look Nicky in the eyes, searchingly, and Nicky answers the wordless question, “Yes, better.”

* * *

Nile hears when they come back into the cabin. She hears them taking softly in Italian, and water running in the kitchenette.

The walls are thin. She heard Nicky crying, before: loud, terrible, wrenching sobs that made her own eyes sting to listen to them. She’d jumped up from the bed and was halfway to the door before she could think.

“Don’t,” Andy said. “Leave them. Joe’s got this.”

And she knows Andy was right, that there was nothing she could do except get in the way, but she’d have felt that instinctive tug to go running if it had been a stranger crying like that. It felt awful, sitting there and doing nothing knowing it was Nicky, knowing it was _supposed to have been her._

She remembers: _“I know what she needs,_ ” and she feels like tearing her skin off.

Slowly the sobs had quieted. But now he’s awake and wandering around with Joe at zero-dark-horrible in the morning.

She gets up carefully. Andy only has two night modes: Brooding and Comatose, and is fortunately currently in the latter. But still.

She puts a hand on the door handle and hesitates. Maybe she still shouldn’t do this. Maybe she shouldn’t do this ever. Maybe any time he looks at her he’s just going to see _that._

But Andy rescued him and Joe’s been taking care of him and she hasn’t even _said_ anything to him except “I’m sorry,” since … since. And maybe that’s the grand total of everything she legitimately has to say. But she doesn’t want to pretend she’s sleeping through this, like she slept through the start of it. She’s there and she wants him to at least know she gives a shit.

Even if part of her thinks maybe the best way to achieve that, other than the therapy thing – which she’s not going to spring on him right now – would be to fuck off out of his line of sight for the next thousand years or so.

But she opens the door and says “hey,” because if these _reserves to draw on_ are a thing she’d really like to see them in action.

She does, kind of. Nicky’s tucked in close against Joe’s side, for one thing, not holding him at that small, excruciating distance. He’s not trembling now, he’s not scary pale. He’s just sitting there, finishing a glass of water on the couch with Joe’s arm around him, so yeah, he looks better than when he was covered in blood and shaking so badly he could barely stay on his feet.

“Did we wake you?” His voice is quiet, but _normal-_ quiet, trying-not-to-wake-Andy quiet, not like the air’s been punched out of him.

“No, I was awake. I guess you couldn’t sleep either?” She doesn’t mention that after she heard him crying she largely gave up trying.

He smiles at her. Or at least in her general direction. “No. It’s normal.”

And it’s still there, of course. She can still see it. His eyes are a little too wide and stark. There’s a subtle tightness to his face behind the smile, like the muscles are still locked in a flinch.

Joe rubs his arm, gently, steadily. He looks _concerned,_ sure, and like he’s maybe not planning on letting Nicky go ever again, but no longer frantic. They both have a sad, practised air of knowing what they’re dealing with, which is encouraging in one way and _really, really not_ in another. She already got that this gig came with way too much exposure to shit that no one should go through even _once._ Even she’s already blasé about getting shot. Has this happened before? To Nicky – to _all_ of them? If you live long enough do some things just become inevitable?

She hasn’t asked and she’s starting to get the feeling she doesn’t have to.

“Are you …” no, fuck, she’s not going to ask Nicky if he’s _okay._ “How are you feeling?”

There’s a long pause as he tries to find the words, and then he closes his eyes and leans into Joe. He murmurs, “È inevitabile che io sia sconvolto, ma passerà.”

He says it slowly enough that she can follow, and opens his eyes at the end, giving her a tired but teacherly glance to see if she understands.

She nods, swallowing. “Sconvolto” from what she remembers, can translate as pretty much anything between “mildly upset” and “completely devastated” depending on context.

Ma passerà. _But it’ll pass._ It’s probably a good sign that he _can_ try to reassure her, even if it makes her feel like shit that he feels he has to.

Joe dips his face against Nicky’s hair. Anguish flares bright for an instant in his eyes where Nicky can’t see it.

Nile takes a deep breath. “I … this might be really stupid. But there’s something I … I thought of something that could maybe … help.”

Nicky actually does look at her properly at that, even if his expression is all polite scepticism.

“OK, I don’t know if you know a video game called Tetris?”

They both look mystified. Nicky shakes his head.

“A video game?” says Joe, dubiously.

“Yeah, it’s from the eighties. You move blocks around, it’s kind of like a jigsaw puzzle. Anyway, I remembered I read an article about this PTSD study a couple of years back. Supposedly, if people play Tetris, right after they’ve been … traumatised, it disrupts the formation of the memories. It kind of diverts your brain’s resources away from remembering into visual processing, so … later it’s not that, like, you _can’t_ remember what happened, but it’s less … less intrusive.”

“That sounds nice,” Nicky says softly, and Joe’s arm tightens protectively around his shoulders.

“Or that’s what they think, anyway.” She was half-convinced they’d dismiss it out of hand, and now she’s terrified she’s given him unreasonably high expectations.

Joe asks, “You have this game?”

“Yeah, you can stream it for free.”

Joe and Nicky glance at each other, and Nicky shrugs. “Show us.”

She grabs her laptop and sits on the arm of the couch beside Nicky. She already has the game ready in a browser tab.

Considering how nonplussed they both were when she described the game, she’s startled by how their faces light up in recognition as soon as it starts.

“Oh,” says Joe, “that’s –?”

“‘Korobeiniki,’” Nicky supplies, incomprehensibly.

Then Joe begins to sing along to the tune: “ _Oy polnym polna moya, korobushka, yest' i sitets i parcha …_ ”

…Tetris has lyrics?

Tetris has lyrics. Just as Joe looks like he’s struggling to remember what comes next, Nicky joins in: “… _Pozhaley, dusha-zaznobushka,_ _molodetskogo plecha_ ,” they chorus, and then smile at each other, bright and unforced and pleased, and she figures this idea was worth it if only for that.

She plays a round to show them how it works, and Nicky says, “So you don’t win anything? You just keep trying to do better, even though it keeps getting harder?”

“Well.” Put that way it seems … heavy. “Yeah.”

“Curious to build walls only for them to disappear,” muses Joe. “What do the blocks symbolise? Sin? Grief? Misunderstandings?”

“You might be overthinking it,” Nicky says dryly as Nile hands him the laptop.

She knows that while none of them are what you’d call Extremely Online for obvious reasons, Nicky can type and find his way around the internet well enough when he needs to. But he arranges his fingers in the unfamiliar position on the keyboard so slowly and laboriously and frowns at the falling shapes with such puzzled mistrust that any other day she’d laugh.

He starts to play. It does not go well.

The couch is small. Joe still has his arm wrapped around Nicky and from where she sits perched on his other side, it’s actually awkward not to touch him too – she has to hold herself unnaturally contracted to keep from brushing against his arm. And she doesn’t want to move away from him. She’d like to rest her hand on his shoulder and hope that says something, because there really aren’t words. She’d like to hug the crap out of him, come to that.

He could barely even let _Joe_ touch him a few hours ago. It feels like a miracle he’s okay with having her in the room.

She shifts her weight, tilting uncomfortably away.

“Have you ever played any video games?” From Nicky’s performance so far she’s guessing no. In fact she’d guess he’d never encountered anything more advanced than a doorbell if she didn’t know better.

“We played the one with the little man,” says Joe as Nicky helplessly pinwheels a Z-piece across the screen until it falls atop an already cluttered tower of coloured shapes.

“Uh. You’re going to have to be more specific.”

Nicky’s screen tops out. He contemplates for a moment, lips thoughtfully pursed, then starts again.

“The little Italian man … there were mushrooms?”

“Oh! Super Mario.”

Nicky rotates a T-block with reasonable deftness and slots it into place.

“Mario, yes. We were building a school … the kids insisted. It must have been fifteen years ago?”

“Thirty-five years ago,” Nicky corrects, and takes out a row with a well-placed L-shape. “In Honduras – ah!” 

Nile and Joe applaud, and Nicky begins to sing again, quietly, on his breath, as the blocks start to fall faster: “ _Vyydu, vyydu v rozh' vysokuyu, tam do nochki pogozhu_ …”

Utterly absorbed now, he constructs a tidy rampart on the left of the screen while he awaits an I-piece. Nile and Joe stop talking except to cheer softly when he annihilates four rows at once or groan in commiseration when he slips up – except after maybe three minutes that basically stops happening, and Nicky looks like he might have stopped hearing them anyway. It’s honestly kind of eerie. Nicky’s evolved from being astonishingly clumsy at Tetris, into some kind of Tetris savant. Nile guesses she shouldn’t be surprised. Sniper focus, and all. 

He surfaces abruptly, in the middle of a round, with a long sigh, and blinks at the screen.

“Well. I don’t know if it has rearranged my brain, but it was distracting. Thank you.” Rather than hand the laptop back to her, he passes it to Joe.

“I don’t need to –”

“ _Joe._ ”

Joe actually rolls his eyes like he’s a hair away from saying “Yes, _mom,_ ” and begins a new game. “Only for a minute,” is what he really says. “We need to get you back to bed.”

It must have been four in the morning already when they made it back here, and now sunlight is starting to filter into the room. Nile says, “I also have a sleep mask, if you want?”

“Yes, please,” says Joe firmly, before Nicky can respond, and it’s Nicky’s turn to look fondly exasperated.

She creeps back into the bedroom. It’s still pretty dark in here, but she can’t turn the light on because of Andy, and when she gropes in her suitcase the sleep mask isn’t in the pocket where she’s sure she packed it.

The thought of having to go back out there and say that she made a mistake, she must have left it in the last hotel or on the plane, nearly makes her burst into tears.

She takes several deep breaths and tries again. She finds the mask in her toiletries bag.

When she returns Nicky’s curled up on the couch with his head on Joe’s shoulder, his eyes sliding half-shut. Joe is dutifully playing Tetris. He is not as spectacularly unpromising a beginner as Nicky was, but nor does he show signs of rising to similar heights.

“Here you go,” she says, handing Nicky the mask. He’s a little hesitant, but he takes it.

“You must sleep too, Nile,” he says. “But thank you.”

He smiles up at her again and she smiles back, and for a moment, it’s okay.

Then maybe he sees in her face that she’s still close to tears or maybe just seeing her _seeing him_ is too much, but she can feel the moment teeter and tip over somehow and there’s nothing she can do about it.

He drops her gaze as if it stung. “Thank you,” he repeats, hollowly, to the floor.

Joe shuts the laptop and hands it back. “Come on,” he murmurs. “Vieni, amore.”

He coaxes Nicky to his feet, almost lifting him bodily from the couch, and herds him gently him to the bedroom with an arm around his waist.

 _Thank you_ , she thinks. For a video game and a sleep mask.

Yeah, they’re all square.

  
  
  
  
\----

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “È inevitabile che io sia sconvolto, ma passerà.” = “It’s inevitable that I’m [upset/shaken/devastated], but it’ll pass.”
> 
> “Vieni, amore” - come on, love.
> 
> The research into Tetris’s effect on PTSD symptoms is [real](https://www.livescience.com/58431-tetris-flashbacks-ptsd.html). As I understand it, there’s fairly good evidence it does reduce flashbacks at least in the short term; more research into longer term outcomes is needed.
> 
> The Russian folksong Korobeiniki (“Peddlers”) is indeed the source of the famous Tetris theme tune. You can hear it [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmEEwy6devY). I took the lyrics from Wikipedia, where you can view a [translation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korobeiniki).


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a lot later than I hoped it would be ... and the length should tell you the reason why. Me, throughout: "OK, but just don't be 4000 words." The chapter: LOL (is 4800 words). I thought about splitting it in two, but I wanted us to get to the end of this particular moment in one go.
> 
> I feel like there should be some sort of "everyone is trying so hard but ouch" warning for this one.
> 
> Thank you so much for your comments and enthusiasm so far! I'm pretty sure I know where I'm going, but I'm feeling my way through this story, and it helps a lot to hear from you. I'm also happy to answer questions if you've got them.
> 
> Thanks so much to Sodiumflare for cheerleading on this story!

Nile finally passes out for a couple of hours with her pillow over her face, and then drags herself into the main room to find the TV on and Andy sprawled sleepily on the couch with her legs flung across Nicky’s lap.

“There’s coffee,” Nicky says, sounding normal enough. But he doesn’t lift his eyes from the screen.

There’s a breakfast of quick, functional mission food spread across the table in front of them. A pack of spongy supermarket brioches filled with jam, a bag of fruit.

“Thank you,” Nile says, and then feels very weird about saying those particular words to him.

She gets herself coffee and a pastry as Joe comes out of the shower in a towel. Usually, in company, he and Nicky are somehow obvious without obviously _doing_ anything; they manage to give the impression of being all over each other when they are, in fact, on opposite sides of a room. So it’s a sweet measure of how fucked up everything is that Joe can’t even make it all the way to the bedroom door without a detour to bend over Nicky and caress his cheek. Nicky smiles faintly, and reaches up to clasp his hand, something warm flickering briefly to life behind his eyes.

Then Joe goes into the bedroom to get dressed and Nicky resumes staring glassily at the TV. There’s a cooking show on; a chef is teaching a … celebrity, maybe, how to make a meat pie. They’re almost manically cheerful about it. Nicky’s got a mug of coffee in the hand that isn’t resting on Andy’s shin, but he’s not actually drinking it.

“Hey, Nile, look at this,” says Andy, pulling down the shoulder of her tank top to reveal fucking huge purple-black stains smeared across her skin.

“Shit, are you OK?”

Andy bruises like a peach, because of course she does. None of the rest of them find the results as ghoulishly satisfying to look at as she does.

Still, at least it gives Nile something to look at that’s not Nicky. She’s trying to stop _monitoring_ him, because she’s not sure she’s all that subtle about it and it has to suck, but she can’t figure out _how_ , and she doesn’t want to tip over into seeming like she’s pretending he’s not there.

Indeed, there’s a meaningful glint in Andy’s eyes as she says, “Yeah, you wanna see my back?”

Nile isn’t actually getting a choice. Andy sits up and hikes up the back of her top.

“ _Yikes,_ ” says Nile, trying to find the tone they had for crowing about “trophies” back in the Marines, and trying not to think about Andy dead. Joking about injuries really needs to be an immortal-to-immortal or mortal-to-mortal thing.

“You know I’d forgotten they could even go that colour?” Andy says proudly. “Almost pretty.”

She’s still talking, still flaunting her bruises like they’re prize hydrangeas, as she grabs another brioche from the table and puts it into Nicky’s hand. Then she flops back down carelessly even though it’s got to hurt like a bitch.

“That’s a roomy definition of _almost,_ ” says Nile.

Nicky takes the pastry mechanically, but it seems like a second or two passes before he actually notices he has it. He frowns, then begins to eat it in small, laborious bites.

It takes him a long time.

Nile tries to drag her attention off him and watch TV instead. Looking at raw meat and carrots first thing in the morning with the sugary taste of the brioche still in her mouth makes her feel faintly nauseous but she pushes through it. The chef crushes a single clove of garlic and Nicky stares and doesn’t scoff that that’s nowhere near enough, or that garlic presses are abominations. But Nile had already realised he wasn’t really watching.

Joe reappears, fully dressed if still a little damp. He lifts Nicky’s cold coffee from his hand and tips it into the sink, then refills his cup. He pours one for himself too and settles on the floor in front of the couch, leaning his back against Nicky’s legs. Neither of them speak, but Nicky sinks his fingers into Joe’s curls and leaves them there.

The chef and the celebrity finish their pie and marvel at it.

“When’s checkout?” Nicky asks, coming back from wherever he’s been.

“We’ve still got an hour,” says Andy.

“Do you have the other keys?”

“I have them,” Nile answers, grateful for the opportunity to say something so normal to him.

Nicky hesitates. “And Kyiv?”

It was next on the list. They were planning to blow up a few server farms, no big deal. But then the training camp hadn’t been supposed to be a big deal either.

Andy reaches for the remote on the floor, and turns off the TV. She replies quietly, “No missions for a while.”

Nicky nods. It’s clearly the answer he was expecting, and he looks relieved, if anything.

“We stick with the exit plan as far as Ostrava. There’s the house outside Karvina, remember? We can lie low a few days, figure out our next move from there.”

Nicky sighs. “I guess, as long as we go back by December, January …”

There’s a series of elections starting in spring. Attacking the servers won’t _stop_ the propaganda and misinformation campaigns, but it’ll be better than nothing.

Andy sits up, slowly, swinging her feet down to the floor. She says, “We’ll take a year.”

Nicky goes absolutely still. Then he smiles, and now Nile knows the lopsided little smiles he gave her last night were some sort of real after all, because apparently this is what Nicky fake-smiling looks like, and it’s _awful._

He suggests, with forced lightness. “Six months.”

But Andy doesn’t haggle back. The casual demeanour she’s been wearing so well fades like mist over the years and the sadness behind it. “No, Nicky.”

Nicky’s eyes blaze icily. He drops the smile. “Do I get a say?”

“Sure,” says Andy, tone hardening in turn. “Tell me. Are you going to be ready in six months? Really?”

For an instant he’s bright and alive with indignation, and although she thinks Andy’s right, although she’s pretty sure this is related to the conversation they had last night and she’s even kind of _proud_ of Andy, Nile wants him to stay that way. She wants him to scream that of course he’ll be ready, that Andy has no business doubting him.

Then his gaze turns inwards, and the light goes out.

He whispers, “No.”

He shrinks in on himself. Joe turns and strokes his forearms, holds his hands, Andy shifts closer and puts a hand on his shoulder like Nile wanted to last night, both of them instinctively closing ranks around him.

Nile stays in her chair. She’s been getting there with them. Waking up briefly in the back seat of a car to find Nicky’s jacket spread over her and her head resting on his shoulder. Joe kissing her joyously on both cheeks when she managed to track down a mafia boss through his girlfriend’s eBay purchases. Trying to modernise Andy’s dance repertoire one night when they were both too drunk to make any headway and ended up collapsed together in a laughing heap. It feels both weird and right to think it: they’re her _family._

But she’s known them for months and they’ve known each other for centuries. She can’t know what to say and _not_ say like Joe and Andy do. And she can’t be part of that little knot of physical comfort. Not when she’s the reason it’s needed.

Nicky says desolately, “I can’t sit and watch TV for a year.”

“No, but you can do it for two months while you figure out what to do with the other ten. You get no one’s leaving you behind, right? I’m not doing this without you. And listen, you want to tell me to go to hell? You want to go and blow up Kyiv? I’ll call you a fucking moron but what else am I going to do about it? I’m not even going to fucking stab you.” Andy’s managed to coax the faintest twitch of a smile out of him. “I can only tell you what to do if you let me. Any of you. But I’m not looking for fights that don’t come looking for me until …” she looks him over, and the words _until you’re better_ hang in the air, a little too heavy to be spoken aloud. She sighs. “… Well, a year feels about right to me.”

“People need us.” But it’s not really a protest now. He sounds so defeated.

“Yeah, well. We need you.” 

Joe urges, “We’ve taken time before.”

“It was different then,” Nicky says, whatever that means.

“It was,” Andy agrees. “These days, I’ve got to plan my time a little differently. C’mon, kid. Don’t make me play the Dying card.”

She ruffles his hair like he’s maybe twelve and tugs him in close, and Nile starts to feel like she shouldn’t be seeing this at all.

She gets to her feet. “I’ll go pack.”

Nicky looks up at her. “Nile.” He fishes her sleep mask out of his pocket and proffers it.

“Oh … that’s okay, you keep it.”

“You should try to sleep on the plane,” he insists.

She really would like him to have it, but she takes it back because it feels like someone ought to go along with him on something.

She’s going through her clothes in the bedroom when she finds yesterday’s shirt with the small patch of dried vomit on it. It isn’t even particularly gross, it would wash right out. Obviously, she can’t keep it. Even if she could be okay with it at some point, she can’t take the risk that Nicky and Joe won’t be.

She balls it up and stuffs it into the waste-paper basket, races through a negative fantasy where someone traces them using the DNA somehow, and is left with the fact that it really isn’t the shirt that’s the problem.

Who needs a shirt as a reminder when they’ve got her.

Nile sits down slowly on the unmade bed.

If she hadn’t managed to throw up. If she’d asked more questions – any questions at all – about _why …_

The aftertaste of the brioches is sickly sweet and she feels like she could do it again perfectly well right now.

She still can hardly believe Nicky and Joe even thought of it– and if they hadn’t, or if they’d tried and it hadn’t … worked …

She wonders what she’d be doing now. Would she have been able to sit out there and eat breakfast with them? She’s not sure she could let them cluster protectively around her, much as she knows they’d want to. Andy, maybe. Perhaps she’d still be in here, curled up in a ball under the covers, dreading having to get up and face them. Or maybe she’d be packing briskly like she’s supposed to be doing right now. Maybe it wouldn’t have really hit her yet.

_I know what she needs._

And it comes blasting back. She can see every pore on the guy’s _face,_ she can smell the beer and sweat, feel the pipes at her back and the cuffs on her wrists. The rest of the men hoot with laughter and their eyes on her feel like they’re already touching her and her body stiffens as she understands what’s about to happen to it and there’s _nothing she can do_ –

Then it roars past her like a speeding train, leaving her reeling in the backdraft, almost faint with huge, disgraceful relief. It’s too intense not to recognise for what it is and it appals her. She puts her face into her hands.

Yeah, great, Nile. So long as it wasn’t you.

If she’d woken up. If she’d asked questions. If she’d realised what they were planning sooner …

What would she have fucking _done_?

She remembers a line from a children’s book: “No one is ever told what _would_ have happened.” That question isn’t going to help anyone, it’s not going to get her anywhere. But she can’t leave it alone; the more it hurts the more her mind goes back to it, like a tongue to a sore tooth.

She’s already sitting there with her head bowed so she clasps her hands and prays for some help to calm the fuck down. She gets some, maybe, or maybe the small ritual is just soothing enough, because she starts feeling a little steadier even before she checks her email and finds a reply from Copley.

Copley’s message is kind of awesomely professional and dispassionate, which is a relief right now. He just says he agrees this is a project that needs extremely careful handling and further discussion, and he’ll arrange flights to London as soon as she’s ready so that can continue. But he’ll start some preliminary research immediately and get back to her.

Okay. Okay. It’s been – Jesus – not even nine hours yet, no wonder everything still sucks. And she can’t fix it, but she’s not completely powerless to help. She always feels better when there’s something she can _do._

No wonder Nicky’s so bereft, having that taken from him.

Her hands twist anxiously on the bedsheets. _Nicky won’t agree to that,_ Andy had predicted, last night. It hadn’t worried her at the time, but it does now. She skims Copley’s email again.

Definitely not yet, she decides, as she resumes packing. Not today. She’ll do as Nicky says and try to catch up on sleep on the plane, then maybe by the time she gets to Ostrava she’ll be a little saner. They’ll go to the safehouse – hopefully it’s one of the nicer ones, maybe somewhere with a fireplace and a stack of dry wood. She and Andy’ll go grocery shopping for real food, and she’ll cook – something hot and a little spicy and comforting. That’s something else she can do. Tomorrow they’ll have nothing to do but rest. She’ll find the right moment and the right words then.

Ten minutes later her phone rings and it’s fucking Copley.

She’s in the act of hauling her suitcase into the living room, where Nicky’s kneeling over the hold-all of weapons she brought in last night, checking through it. Andy, who can make a small dumpster’s worth of scattered tank tops, jeans and underwear disappear into a tiny bag in ten seconds, is already good to go and waiting for the rest of them to catch up. And Joe comes out of the bedroom at the sound, frowning.

He and Nicky both look alarmed. There’s basically no one else that could be calling her, not on that phone anyway, and by now Copley will know the building they never intended to go inside is a burned-out shell full of un-planned-for corpses. He’ll know if anyone’s after them.

So she has to answer. “Is everything OK?”

“Well. Apparently not,” Copley doesn’t sound dispassionate at all; he sounds upset. “I just – I wasn’t happy with how I left things in that email. I – I’m so sorry things clearly went so badly wrong. If there’s anything else I–”

“I’ll call you back!” she practically yells at him, and hangs up.

“Was that Copley? Are we compromised?” Joe demands at once, taking an instinctive step closer to Nicky.

“No, no. We’re fine.”

Nicky asks, “Then why is he calling you?”

Fuck. But there’s no way she’s going to lie to them.

“Okay. So, I was thinking I’d go to London,” she begins.

And she tells them.

There’s a silence. Then Nicky sighs and his shoulders sag over the weapons, like she’s just siphoned a good 15 percent of the energy he had left right out of his body. She digs her nails into her palms.

“Nile, I know you want to help. But I just need _time_.” His voice cracks a little. “And some things aren’t open to us.”

“Maybe they could be,” Andy says.

Nicky blinks, as incredulous as if he just heard a stranger’s voice coming out of his friend’s mouth. “What?”

“We’ve already got Copley. Maybe getting some more help once in a while wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.”

Nile wishes Nicky would at least get up off the floor; she doesn’t like the way everyone’s kind of _looming_ over him, but it seems like he’s maybe forgotten how to move. She doesn’t like the way it must be obvious she and Andy have already talked about this behind his back. They’re all looking at him now and he must feel – he _is –_ so singled out. She says, “Not just for you.”

He looks at her with sudden, stark pain as though she’s hit him. She takes a step back, bewildered and horrified.

Andy says, “She doesn’t mean just her, either, Nico, or just this.”

Nicky’s shoulders come down a bit, not that the trapped, panicked look that remains is much better, and Nile doesn’t understand what just happened. It’s always at least a little hard, the way these three can practically read each others’ minds and she can’t keep up, but right now it’s not just _hard,_ it’s making this _worse_ when she’s so desperate to make it at least a little better.

Except then, she thinks, she gets it. Too slow to be any use, two steps behind Andy, her brain provides a horrified translation of what she said into what she suspects he _heard_ :

_I’m just as hurt as you. You didn’t help me. You didn’t save me. It was for nothing. It wasn’t enough._

“Nicky,” she breathes, blinking rapidly. She can see him flinch at the distress on her face and she, in turn, can’t help reacting to that, and they can’t seem to look away from each other, caught in an awful feedback loop.

She feels a sudden shock of rage that hasn’t hit her since she realised what was about to happen. They both feel so fucking responsible. And what the fuck do _they_ have to feel guilty about? It isn’t fair. They’re not the ones doing this to each other.

“There’s hardly a shortage of material, between us,” Andy says.

“Boss,” says Joe, “We’ve spent centuries in hiding and you want us to stop _now_?”

And if there was any doubt what he meant Nicky croaks, “After Merrick?”

“Hear her out,” says Andy, and looks at Nile expectantly like Nile has some kind of presentation ready.

She panics.

Except, then she sits on the couch and opens her mouth and instead of the stammering mess she expects, she find the words coming, even and sure. “I’m not saying anything about going public. But we trust Copley now, and frankly there have to be people out there that are a whole lot worthier of trust. We’ve just got to find one. So we do the research; we’d background check the hell out of anyone we even consider. And we’d build in failsafes. We could do videocall sessions. Lots of therapists offer that anyway. Copley can set us up with encrypted connections. They never even have to know which continent we’re on. And yeah, there’d still be a risk. I think we could get it down to almost nothing, but it’d still be there. But it’s _always_ there. It’s there every time we take a job. There’s always a chance we’ll get hurt and heal where someone can see it, that someone’s going to find out what we are and use it against us. But we take the risk so that we can help. We do that for other people. I think we’re all worth the same.”

Nicky and Joe both look from her to Andy, who shrugs. “I think she has a point.”

Joe glances down thoughtfully and then at Nicky with cautious hope in his eyes. And she’s convinced him, she can see that. And if she can, of course Nicky can too. He meets Joe’s gaze and recoils at what he sees there. He starts to breathe faster. He looks from Joe, to Andy, to Nile.

Three against one.

He gets to his feet. He says, “Well, it seems the decision’s already been made.”

He walks out.

She already knew that for all that Nicky’s the quiet one, the words he chooses can be devastating. She’s never been on the receiving end of it before.

  
* * *  
  


Nicky strides blindly down towards the lake.

He discovers immediately that this isn’t going to be a full-blown panic attack and that it isn’t going to subside quickly either. His lungs drag down one ragged breath after another, his pulse jars through his body, chest and temples and throat – but he’s not quite hyperventilating, there’s neither the terror nor the awful relief of reality shattering around him: he knows exactly what this is. And there’s no way down from this region of thin air yet.

Joe’s following him, of course, Nicky isn’t even sure if he heard his voice or his footsteps, or if he simply _knows,_ but when he reaches the jetty he swings round and says wildly, “I can’t do it.”

“All right,” says Joe, instantly.

“Kozak’s still out there. Who knows who she’s told about us? There must be others who’d like to carve pieces out of us. If – if we _give_ someone that much power over us, and they – Joe, if I ever have to go through that again, if I ever have to see it happen to you, _it can’t be because of this._ ”

He’s both touched and frustrated at the way Joe’s gaze floods with compassion at this, as though it was just a howl of pain, not an argument. Joe says again, more softly, “All right.”

Nicky kicks a pebble into the water. “Stop _humouring_ me.”

Joe stops doing anything; he stands there in silence, easily within reach but not too close. And for now that’s infuriating too, being treated like a spooked animal – all the more so that he knows Joe’s right to do it.

The ripples spread across the lake. There’s no sound but the birds and his own unsteady gasps for air.

Eventually Joe murmurs, “No one will make you do anything. I won’t let them.”

“But you think Nile’s right.”

It sounds like an accusation and it is. Joe takes a breath. “Yes.”

“It isn’t necessary. I’ve been through _worse_.” Again Joe says nothing, just waits, and Nicky grimaces as his own words catch up with him. “That’s. That’s not –” He sits down, suddenly, on the damp wood of the jetty. “That’s not a very convincing argument, is it?”

Joe sits beside him, and smiles crookedly. “Perhaps not.”

“But I’ve got better,” Nicky whispers. “I’ve _recovered_ from worse. That’s what I meant. I know what to do, I’ve learned what to do. It’s not … _easy,_ but I can do it.”

“I know. I know.” Nicky can feel that he means it, thank God, as last night he couldn’t – Joe’s faith like steady ground beneath him. “But I _wish_ it was easy, Nicky. I wish someone could make it easier, any part of it … if that’s possible, I’d do anything.” He spreads his hands. “But it’s up to you.”

“It’s not,” says Nicky, choked. “It’s not that simple.”

Joe waits for him to elaborate, but Nicky can’t. His pulse resounds through his skull, still, too loud to let him think straight.

“Copley doesn’t know,” Joe remarks after a while. “Nile wanted me to say: she didn’t tell him. He knows something bad happened, but he was going to find that out anyway.”

Nicky hadn’t given any conscious thought to what Copley knows, but it does steady him slightly to think that he still has at least that much control, over any part of this.

He’s been so exposed, body and soul stripped and laid open, and for all that he’s understood the concept of _the talking cure_ for well over a century and the relief of the confessional for far longer than that, it seems unconscionable that it’s now he’s expected to give permission for someone to probe into him further.

And if he did – where would he even start? With last night? With the crusades? With the fire in the village church when he was six?

What can sharp, delicate modern tools, built for work on such a different scale, do to lives like theirs?

“I can’t,” he hears himself gasping, and leans into Joe’s arms, the words smothered against his chest. “I can’t – it could go so wrong.”

“If they hurt you I’d kill them,” says Joe.

Nicky pulls back to frown at him. “Joe! No you wouldn’t.”

They stare at each other blankly for an instant and then Joe’s expression clears and he says, “Oh, you meant _emotionally_ ,” and despite everything, they laugh.

“If they made you feel worse I would merely _want_ to kill them,” Joe amends. “And I would take you far away from them, somewhere quiet and beautiful where no one could find you.”

Nicky shuts his eyes, lingers in the daydream for a moment.

“Would you want to? Talk to one of those people?”

“Not if you don’t want me to.”

“Oh.” Of everything that’s been said this morning, it’s this that makes his eyes fill with tears. Joe says it so straightforwardly, like it’s nothing. “Joe, don’t say that.”

Joe thumbs the tears away as they spill. “My heart, why?”

“You can’t give up something like that for me. Do you need this? You can’t let me stop you.”

Joe sighs, an unhappy pucker forming between his eyebrows. “I was thinking maybe if I did, I’d be better at helping you.”

Nicky wraps his arms around him. “No, you’re perfect at that. You don’t need to be better.” Joe huffs out a sad, unconvinced breath against his cheek and Nicky grips him tighter. “Do you want this? For yourself.”

Joe’s no longer as terrified for him as he was. But the guilt can’t have gone away altogether, even if by now part of him understands it isn’t deserved. He can’t have escaped the memory of what he heard, or what he must, all too accurately, _imagine._

And it’s heartbreaking, seeing Nicky like this now. Nicky knows that.

“I don’t know. I’d need more information. It’d depend on the person.” Joe hesitates. Then he mumbles, “I’d give it a chance, I guess.”

Nicky clings on in silence. He feels as if he’s falling.

In a way it makes no difference. It’s already clear that Nile wants to turn to the remedies of a world she hasn’t yet had to outlive.

And if the others want this, any of them – if they’ll suffer without it – if they merely _believe_ that they’ll suffer without it – how could Nicky ever try to veto it and live with himself? And then what does it matter if he’s the only one to sit it out? If any of them takes the risk they all do.

Joe goes on, **“** But love, I’m hardly wedded to it. I never considered it before, it doesn’t seem much of a sacrifice to me to say I wouldn’t again.” He shifts back so he can look Nicky in the eyes. “But if it is, can I at least say … I don’t think either of us should consider it any more now? And that I don’t care how long that lasts?”

It’s not a real escape. It’s little more than pulling the blankets over his eyes and pretending the world’s gone away. But for now it feels as close to a lifeline as he’s going to get.

He nods heavily, lets his head sink onto Joe’s shoulder. Finally his heart slows, the air starts to lose its cutting edge.

His voice comes out blurred with exhaustion. **“** Can we do what you said? Go somewhere quiet.”

Joe pulls him almost into his lap, tries to fold himself around him. “Yes. Yes, we’ll do that.”

* * *  


“It’s not your fault,” Andy says. “You know that, you’re not an idiot. But I guess it needs saying.”

Nile nods mechanically, because yeah, it does.

“Maybe I shouldn’t come to Karvina with you. Maybe I should head off by myself for a while.”

“Hey.” Andy grasps her shoulder. “There’s no need for that.”

“I think there is.” Nile drags her sleeve across her eyes again. “I think everyone needs a _break_.”

She means it. Okay, maybe it’s not her _fault,_ but she is the living monument to _t_ _he problem – lest-we-for-fucking-get –_ and she doesn’t want Nicky to have to stand it any more. She can’t stand it herself. But some part of her wants Andy to fight her, all the same.

Andy glances out the window again. There’s still no sign of anybody coming back.

She says, “Yeah. Maybe that’s a good idea.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Boxing Day!
> 
> Well, apparently long chapters approximately every fortnight is how this fic works, from the look of it.
> 
> Please note the updated tags. No actual self-harm or disordered eating as such, but a fairly vivid evocation of the appeal of those things.
> 
> \---

The sea is as smooth as a bolt of silk. The fish glimmer below him; the water’s as clear as if it weren’t there. Across the Pagasetic Gulf, the wooded hills of the peninsula lie soft and silver-blue on the horizon, like crumpled folds of sky.

Nicky stands on the rocks, swings the line in tight, rapid circles over his head and casts the hook into the shallows.

His uncle first taught him to fish in the bay at Boccadasse in Genoa, but it was from Andy that he learned this – no rod, just a hook and a roll of cord you could take anywhere, always ready in a pocket or a saddlebag. Even centuries ago the simplicity of it gave him a pleasurable sense of something timeless. Like Adam in the garden, he used to think, already knowing Andy would snort derisively if he said it aloud. He still likes the way the line feels like an extension of himself, probing quietly under the surface, feeling the sway of the waves.

Someone passes along the promenade behind him, and tension crawls across his shoulders. Nicky looks round, annoyed with himself even before he sees a heavy-set man in his sixties, a head shorter than he is, ambling placidly towards the café. He takes a seat at a little table on the pavement, alongside a trio of men the same age who have been chatting over coffee for hours now.

Sometimes they glance at Nicky. He doesn’t think he’s imagining it. No reason to think there’s anything strange or hostile in their attention. They’re probably mildly curious about the Greek-speaking foreigners renting the little house on the edge of the village. The days are still warm, but the summer’s over; there aren’t many tourists left.

It’s almost certainly nothing to do with him when they laugh.

Maybe next time he should walk further along the coast, out of the village, find a little cluster of rocks where nobody goes.

Or he should stay where he is and get through this, prove to himself it’s all right. Already the dryness in his mouth is fading, his heartbeat slowing back to normal. He’s only uneasy, nothing worse.

He feels something tug on his hook. He waits, pulling on the line, not too hard, not trying to land it yet, letting the fish wear itself out.

Maybe the Tetris did work. The onslaughts of memory – flashbacks, there are names for everything now – haven’t happened often.

But sometimes he thinks the quieter, less violent ways it comes back to him are actually worse. Only once his sleeping mind has pinned him back on that table, made him feel them gouge their way into him again. Only once he’s woken screaming, to sob himself raw in Joe’s arms until he dropped back into exhausted, dreamless, effortless sleep. Far more often he dreams blurred hands reaching for him and silently flinches awake before they can touch him, adrenaline scalding his body, and can’t sleep again for hours.

Once, loud, drunken male laughter spilled from the door of some bar in Volos, and time stuttered _–_ and he was _there –_ and then in an alley, propped against the brickwork, Andy beside him murmuring, “There you go, that’s it, you can breathe, you’re OK.”

But he’s lost count of how often, on no external prompting at all, his muscles have drawn painfully tight and his heart’s begun to race, yet it doesn’t unmoor him in time, isn’t bad enough to interfere with whatever he’s doing. It stays bearable.

It stays and stays and stays.

He begins to pull the fish in, hand over hand.

He will grill the bream with lemon and garlic, and it will be delicious. He can’t imagine being hungry, but sometimes he is, when it comes to it. He’s going to eat it even if he’s not.

The fish is silver and lovely and frantically alive, and Nicky feels a strange, exasperating pang of squeamishness at pulling the little life out of the water. What right has he to such a feeling? He caught his first fish nine hundred and forty-one years ago. He doesn’t want to think how many human beings he’s killed since then.

But when he used to do this centuries ago, it actually mattered. They couldn’t be always at war. Yes, sometimes, as they rode away from battle or as a siege dragged towards its end, they’d promise each other rest. Sometimes when they heard of armies gathering and borders breached they’d look at each other and see too many shadows of older wars in each other’s eyes, and say, “Not yet.” But peace came of its own accord, too. No way, back then, to know where every invasion, every pogrom was; no way to race across the world in time even if you did. So he fished because they needed the food, or the money he could make selling the catch at market. He always liked the meditative slowness, the excuse to spend hours gazing at the sea. But it wasn’t a pastime. It wasn’t busywork to keep him occupied because he was too fragile to do anything of any _use_ to anybody –

He stops himself.

Carefully, he retraces his steps.

He likes fishing, so he’s fishing. That’s all; that’s enough. Ioanna from the house by the taverna is doing the same thing few yards away. He’s not about to stalk along the promenade and shout at her that unless this is her only way to feed her family she should be bleeding in some stranger’s war instead.

 _I think we’re all worth the same._ Who said that, recently?

Nile.

The sun is warm on his bare arms. The gulf wraps him in blue on blue on blue.

He’s so tired. Of being gentle with himself, of giving himself time. Of all the helpful, exhausting little rituals that make it _better_ but don’t make it go away. Of the distance between knowing the way home and actually being there.

He rests but doesn’t let himself stay in bed all day. He feels vaguely sick about half the time and eats anyway. He used to let himself waste down to bone. Never again. His hands knot into fists and he breathes and makes them relax. He walks himself back from edge after edge. He can’t even complain that these things aren’t working. They are. If nothing else they save him from slipping into the darker, famished spaces that he knows lie below this one. 

But it’s been less than a month and already he doesn’t want to do any of it, he wants to –

What? Scream, smash something, burst into tears?

Give up?

It’s reasonable to be angry. It’s understandable to be frustrated. It’s _been less than a month._ All of this is normal.

He’s sick of the calm, kind voice in his own head that talks him down.

How ridiculous, to be tired of his own patience. To resent wisdom won so hard. To catch himself thinking that if only he couldn’t do this then at least he wouldn’t have to.

It frightens him sometimes, the weariness, the thoughts that come with it. _Yes, I can do this, but how many times_? How long before this, or something else that cuts just as deep happens again? It makes him think of Andy, the weight in her eyes that only started to lift when Nile came. If it was Nile that made the difference, and not the beginning of death, a finish line in sight at last. And he’s not there, he’s not ready for it all to be _over,_ he knows he’s not. He’s just – closer.

There’s a knife with the rest of his fishing kit. He thinks about stabbing the point into the meat of his hand, watching it heal in mere seconds.

Does he have to tell Joe that? He was never going to do it.

No, no he’s not getting worse. Not really. He hasn’t slept well and now it’s harder to keep his mind from wandering down these blind alleys. That’s all.

Yesterday was better.

Ioanna comes over to peer critically at his catch. She’s somewhere in her fifties, short, with a pleasant, weather-beaten face. She uses a handline to fish too; they’ve already agreed on the feeling of timelessness and its superiority for shallow water. She’s complimented his Greek and told him all about his landlady’s divorce.

“How are you going to cook it?” she demands without preamble.

He tells her. She looks sceptical.

“But do you have oregano?”

“Well, dried, but I –”

“No, not dried, with grilled bream you should use fresh, you stuff the fish with it right before you cook it, it grows wild on the Pelion and nobody here bothers to pick it any more, nobody cares. Such a waste. But _you_ like to do things properly.”

This is only the second time they’ve spoken, but she’s reached several approving conclusions about him purely on the strength of their shared preference in fishing techniques, and she has, already, given him a lot of advice.

He nods. He’s planning to use fennel.

“You go hiking, don’t you,” she continues. “Next time, you should pick some. And ironwort, for mountain tea – have you tried it? It’s good for you. You should take the train up to Milies and walk from there. There’s a good restaurant, too; the views are beautiful. You should take your wife.”

“Oh … Andy’s my – my sister.”

Ioanna frowns, confused. “She doesn’t have an accent; I thought she was Greek. Then the artist is – your brother-in-law?”

Weariness floods him even before they say anything else.

Centuries of gauging where they must be careful about even being seen to touch, where they can walk hand in hand and be considered _blood brothers_ but risk a beating if they kiss on the lips, where there will be tolerance punctuated with unsettled glances and knowing sniggers, and the rare, delicate oases where they are seen and welcomed. 

_I do not care what they think,_ they have told each other, so many times. But it does not matter whether or not they care _,_ they are never truly unaware of it, they must always decide whether the price of ignoring it is one they can afford. Almost a thousand years. Mostly, Nicky does believe he’ll live to see the end of it. Right now, he feels he’ll be too tired to care even if he does.

“My husband,” he says.

“What?”

He doesn’t repeat himself. He stares at her.

She makes a wordless sound of shock and distaste and after standing frozen for a second, walks away.

Nicky takes a fish from the bucket and guts it with no compunction at all.

* * *

Nile is in London. Nile’s in touch with Copley, everything’s fine. Nile says hi.

“Ask him yourself,” he overhears Andy grumbling into her phone on the balcony. “He’s not allergic to you.”

But Nile’s not wrong. He doesn’t want her to ask how he is. And he doesn’t want to know what she’s doing. 

If he’s honest, it was a relief at first not having to see himself mirrored in her eyes, knowing that if more nightmares came, at least she wouldn’t hear him through the walls.

But he misses her. He knows her silence isn’t because she’s angry with him or has stopped caring about him and hopes she understands the same of his, but it hurts all the same. And for God’s sake, she’s been an adult for less than one decade and he’s been one for more than ninety; he’s the one who should fix this. He should open the balcony door, ask for Andy’s phone, talk to her.

He doesn’t.

He doesn’t know how to pick a way around the last conversation they had, and he cannot think about restarting it – literally cannot, when he tries his mind fills with static; the air goes thin. The fact that at some point he’s going to have to only makes it worse.

And he worries – she’s so alone, and nobody’s said anything but he feels as if he chased her away.

“Give her my love,” he whispers to Andy. She sighs, but doesn’t give him the same exasperated lecture poor Nile is getting, she just does it.

* * *

They pass Ioanna coming out of the little grocery. She stops, flustered, doesn’t know where to look

He wanted quiet, but maybe it was a mistake – in a city they’d be less conspicuous, people would be more accepting, or at least more distracted. They don’t have to stay here.

But just the thought of being in a crowd, strangers’ bodies brushing against his makes his nerves thrum with panic.

He laces his fingers through Joe’s and walks on.

* * *

He wakes, his pulse banging.

He doesn’t know where he is, but Joe’s there, curled against his back; he can hear the sea, nothing else.

Greece. The village outside Volos. Safe, they’re safe. 

An after-image of grinning faces and reaching hands lingers behind his eyes. He waits, breathes, listens to the waves. It begins to fade.

Maybe he’ll fall asleep again, this time.

There’s a muffled sound at his back. Joe’s fingers twitch on his arm. Nicky turns over.

Joe is crying in his sleep.

“Joe.” Nicky strokes his cheek. He can tell it isn’t the kind of nightmare where it isn’t safe to touch. But Joe doesn’t wake; tears well from under his closed lids; a terrible, despairing whimper grinds through his clenched teeth. Perhaps, in the dream, he is screaming. Nicky lifts his face, calls louder: “Yusuf!”

Joe’s eyes fly open. They stare at him uncomprehending for an instant, then he gasps, “Nicolò _,_ ” and throws himself at Nicky, rolling over on top of him, cradling his head as if shielding him from a hail of gunfire.

Nicky lies underneath him, letting Joe’s fingers flutter over his face with frantic tenderness. Some part of him notes that Joe’s weight on him feels as right as it always has, for all that Joe’s been so careful not to crowd or startle him lately, would never have pounced on him like this if he was thinking straight.

“I died?” He asks when he feels Joe’s heart begin to slow a little. He recognises this.

Joe smothers a sob in the hollow of his neck. “I – I _killed_ you –“

“Oh, Joe…”Nicky winds his limbs around him as tight as he can. “I’m here, I’m here.”

“I’m sorry,” Joe pants. “I’m sorry I woke you.”

“You didn’t, I was already awake.”

But that clearly doesn’t make Joe feel any better. He tenses, clutching Nicky even tighter, then sighs and shifts off him.

“Could you go back to sleep?” he asks.

“Not now,” Nicky has to admit. And it’s obvious Joe can’t.

There’s a gloss of moonlight on the black waves. It’s far from the first time they’ve walked along the front in the dark.

They sit on a bench overlooking the little marina.

“What happened?”

It’s not unprecedented, although it’s been a long time. They both know too well what killing each other feels like.

“Oh, it didn’t make any sense. It was Merrick’s and you were – “ Joe’s voice hitches “ – on the ground, but …”

“But I didn’t come back.”

“And then it was as if I’d been lying to myself that it was someone else, as if that was the dream and now I remembered –– it couldn’t be true but it – _was._ I was still holding the gun and I _knew_ I’d shot you and there wasn’t any reason, how could there be – how could I possibly –”

“Horrible,” Nicky says, putting an arm round him, kissing his temple. “Horrible, Joe.” 

Joe grips the edge of the bench and breathes deeply. He’s still not really ready to pull himself together, Nicky can tell, but he does it anyway.

“It wasn’t real,” he says. “It’s all right.”

But the horror and the guilt are real enough.

“Joe…”

“Don’t,” whispers Joe.

“You did nothing wrong.”

He didn’t have the strength to absolve Joe the night it happened. He wants so badly to be able to, now. 

Joe stares at the sea. “You shouldn’t have to deal with this too.”

“Love, please. It wasn’t you. None of it was _you_. It was _them_ – ”

Joe turns and meets his eyes. “It’s all right,” he promises again. “I know. You don’t have to tell me. I don’t need you to worry about me. All I need is for you to be well.”

“I’m trying,” Nicky says helplessly.

Joe clasps his arms. “I see it, every day. I wish you didn’t have to. It’s enough.”

Nicky thinks of Nile. He isn’t trying everything.

His heart begins to beat harder again.

“Why were you awake?” Joe asks.

“The usual.” Joe’s mouth twists in sympathy. “It’s not so bad. Nothing happens, it’s just – about to.”

Joe hugs him, hiding his expression against Nicky’s face. “Bad enough, my heart,” he says.

Joe’s hands pass softly, reverently over his hair, his back. There’s nothing he can do to soothe Joe except let Joe soothe him.

* * *

He tries harder.

“Are you coming in?”

Joe laughs at him fondly. “No, you mad Northerner. It’s freezing.”

The Pelion rises above the little beach in a grey-green cloak of wild olive trees. They could have gone further, dodged the oncoming winter altogether, but the Mediterranean always feels like home, to both of them.

Joe’s sketching Andy, perched on a rock, gazing at the turquoise water of the cove through her sunglasses. She never used to let him do it. Still won’t allow him to draw her with her labrys.

It’s so kind of her to be here, on the edge of the sea. For decades after they gave up searching Nicky felt guilty for loving it still.

Quynh’s not in the Mediterranean.

Nicky plunges in. The water’s colder than he’d like, too, but he hopes he’ll be able to eat and sleep better for doing it, and after the first shock the cold and the motion sends delight cascading along his nerves. He ploughs across the little bay, where he clings to an outcrop of golden rock, disturbing a pair of jade-green crabs before the cold chases him into motion again. But his body adjusts; as long as he keeps moving the water feels like a caress. The sea and the sky glitter around him.

He tries not to be too conscious of Joe and Andy observing, making hopeful mental notes: Nicky is doing better today.

At last the cold catches up with him and he wades out of the water. Joe’s smile wobbles briefly when he sees him shiver. But then he tackles him with a towel and begins scrubbing vigorously, and Nicky laughs, pulls him down on the bamboo mat and kisses him hard. He catches the flash of surprise and joy in Joe’s eyes and grins up at him, then kisses him again, sighing against his lips as Joe’s fingers spread across his ribs. He’s still cold enough that Joe’s lips, Joe’s hands blaze where they touch him. He seems to flow back into his skin from some stifled place outside it; his body feels luminous, alive, his.

They stop. Andy’s there, looking on with amused tolerance, melancholy and gladness layered behind it, so he doesn’t have to look at the fact that he’d need to stop anyway. Besides, there’s the picnic he packed for them, and he’s _ravenous._

He wolfs down bread and houmous and olives, and settles back against Joe in the sun.

There’s a weathered plastic bottle half-buried in the sand. Ribbons of plastic in the dried seaweed. When you start noticing it, it’s everywhere.

He tries to dodge the shadow but it spreads.

There are desperate refugees in flimsy boats somewhere beyond the lovely horizon, floundering between what was once Joe’s home and what was once his.

Copley’s wall was a shaft of light through the clouds, a glimpse of grace he always tried to believe was there without ever expecting to see the proof.

But, _but,_ if they truly do have a purpose, what does it mean to put it aside? If the good they do grows, then how far will the loss travel beyond each life they fail to save? The plans they’ve abandoned over this – what will that cost the world?

He grits his teeth, frustrated. They’re here to put some good into the world, he’s always said. Not to extract every evil; he knows they can’t do that. Joe would – _does_ – deserve time to recover, without being hectored like this. Therefore, so does he. Healing isn’t a _waste of time_ , obviously not, how does he still need to remind himself?

He exhales and makes his jaw relax and then turns to his tattered paperback; maybe the thirtieth copy that he’s owned. By now he could probably recite most of it by heart, in Latin, Italian, French, English…

_Be like a rocky promontory against which the restless surf continually pounds; it stands fast while the churning sea is lulled to sleep at its feet. I hear you say, "How unlucky that this should happen to me!" Not at all! Say instead, "How lucky that I am not broken by what has happened and am not afraid of what is about to happen. The same blow might have struck anyone, but not many would have absorbed it without capitulation or complaint.”_

He rests his gaze on the water. _How lucky that I am not broken._ He can say that much.

Andy plucks off her sunglasses. “Fuck it. Race you to that buoy.”

“I only just got him warmed up,” Joe complains.

Andy strips down to her underwear. She didn’t bring a swimsuit, she hasn’t swum for the pleasure of it in five hundred and twenty years. “Like you’ll hate having to do that again.”

“You will both get cramp.”

“Terrifying.” She pokes Nicky with her foot. “Come on. Bet you a hundred.”

She sprints with him down to the water and throws herself in. He feels a surge of love for her and he thinks it gives her an unfair advantage; she beats him.

* * *

Today’s not so good.

It’s been cloudy all day, drizzling on and off; soon it really will be too cold to swim and then what’ll he do? He wouldn’t have made it out of bed or managed to eat anything without Joe and Andy helping him, coaxing him from one exhausting step to the next, and the sun’s already low in the sky by the time he gathers the strength to get further than the sofa. He can barely say where the hours have gone. Lying there crumpled with his head in Joe’s lap, while somewhere in the distance he and Andy took turns reading the gentlest stories from _The Decameron_ aloud – did it really last so long? He was trying to get up, the whole time.

He doesn’t want to go outside, but he has to; it’s one of his rules for himself, like not letting himself starve, even when food feels like more dirt and weight to pull him down and privation feels like freedom.

If the daylight only lasted longer. He hates this time of year.

The others would have come with him, of course, but he wants to do one thing today by himself. He leaves Joe sketching Andy, takes his hook and line and a handful of the frozen shrimp he’s using as bait and walks down to the shore. There’s a reason he makes himself do this, why he and Joe go out so often now when he wakes in the night. Walking under the sky, even when it’s dull as concrete, always helps at least a little. The rhythm of the sea laps at the edges of the lump of stone in his chest, wearing them smooth.

But within seconds of turning his back to the village he feels exposed, on display, a silent audience ranked behind him. There’s no one about, and why should it matter if there were? But the mere possibility of being _seen_ feels like hands, bodies pressing against him and –

This time he doesn’t fight the impulse to hide. He winds up the line and considers going back inside – that’s allowed, he’s already done as much as he demanded of himself today – but instead he heads along the front and onto the gravel track out of the village, towards the wilder shoreline where the trees grow down to the water’s edge. He steps off the path onto a little breakwater of tumbled rocks.

Someone’s behind him. He _is_ being followed; it’s not paranoia. He wheels round.

Ioanna clears her throat. “Hello, Nikos.”

He looks at her icily. They often adopt the local version of their names, where there is one, and he said “Nikos is fine” when they first met, but on top of everything else it irritates him to hear it from her now. She knows perfectly well his name is Nicolò.

She mutters something inaudible.

He snaps, “What?”

He’s so _tired._

She says, humbly, politely, like a child repeating a lesson – and what else is she, to him? – “How’s your husband?”

Neither one of them is prepared for him to burst out laughing. They stare at each other, both shocked. Ioanna goes wide-eyed and then, maybe from sheer panic, begins cackling along with him.

“He’s fine,” he replies, when he can speak. It may not be quite true, but that isn’t the point. “How’s yours?”

“He’s a pain in the arse,” she says. And she tells him exactly how.

* * *

_No matter what anyone says or does, my task is to be good. Like gold or emerald or purple repeating to itself, “No matter what anyone says or does, my task is to be emerald, my colour undiminished.”_

* * *

He goes down to the nearest beach with a rubbish bag and plucks plastic bottle tops and shreds of packaging from between the rocks. At least it’s something. He feels self-conscious at first, tense at every glance that lands on him, but by the time the bag’s a quarter full he’s peacefully absorbed. A couple of times he looks up and someone really is watching him, and he says, “Yasas,” and they smile and say it back.

His phone chimes as he’s tying the bag up. He pulls it out.

His heart jolts a little at Nile’s name.

There’s no text in the message. Nile has sent a photograph of a tree rising above a drab grey London wall. Half its leaves are gone but those that remain glow a flamboyant lemon-yellow against a startlingly blue sky.

He enlarges the picture and looks at it.

He texts back: _Beautiful._

 _Just wanted you to see it,_ Nile replies.

He sends her a picture of the gulf, lavender and blue in the first shades of sunset.

_Wow. Well, can’t top that._

He writes back on impulse: _Try._

Moving dots on the screen.

_OK. You’re on.  
  
  
  
  
_

_____

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nicky is reading _[Meditations](https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/17212.Marcus_Aurelius) by Marcus Aurelius_ . Just look at those quotes. His exact bag, no?
> 
> [Where they are](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Pagasetic+Gulf/@39.2292403,22.9535409,3a,75y,90t/data=!3m8!1e2!3m6!1sAF1QipOLYuZkcrcVHBZ2RRtOBL3_eBtlipevn20Cn4L8!2e10!3e12!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipOLYuZkcrcVHBZ2RRtOBL3_eBtlipevn20Cn4L8%3Dw152-h86-k-no!7i3840!8i2160!4m5!3m4!1s0x14a73f43e7e57177:0xa5ee925ea2573e87!8m2!3d39.2292403!4d22.9535409) (more or less).
> 
> I hope you had a great Christmas if you celebrate and a lovely Friday if you did not. May 2021 all treat us a little more kindly. And if I may request a belated Christmas gift; if you like this story, I would love to hear from you.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy New Year! Happy post-Trump-world! Thank fuck for that!
> 
> Sorry for the delay. It's another whopper. Quick note for this chapter: Nile is neglecting herself a bit. She gets pretty drunk at one point, and has both bad and good experiences.

They throw out all of Copley’s research on day one.

Yes, there are other people – politicians, intelligence operatives – who need their mental health practitioners screened for higher-than-standard dedication to confidentiality and definitely not being Russian spies. Yes, there are therapists out there who are already used to handling more-than-usually sensitive secrets. But if Copley can figure out who any of them are (and he has), then it’s not enough. And talking to any of them would put Nile and the others just one degree of separation from the exact kind of people they most want to avoid.

“We’re not looking for someone with connections in high places,” Copley concludes.

“It’s not even just that,” Nile says. “Anyone we talk to needs to be on board with what we do. It’s not enough if they don’t see us as potential lab rats; they can’t see us as criminals either. These people – their relationship to authority is wrong. We need someone who doesn’t think we oughta be wearing a uniform before we get in a fight.”

“Someone who doesn’t think physical force is only legitimate when authorised by the state,” summarises Copley. “You want an _anarchist_ therapist.”

There’s enough Marine left in Nile that she has to take a second to boggle over where she’s ended up. “Well. Yeah.”

They get into a routine of sorts. Nile reads psychology journals and watches a lot of very expensive DVDs where therapists demonstrate different approaches. Copley dumps craploads of social media data into creepy software whose very existence the kind of person they’re looking for would loathe. They both come up with names and Copley digs up their criminal records and their college essays and their online shopping habits and the metadata on all their emails and then runs it all through yet further creepy software. Then they compare notes and move bios and photos up and down on their board of potentials.

It’s kind of … soothing. Nile still isn’t a hundred per cent sure what she thinks of Copley as a person but he’s great as a colleague: intelligent, focused, responsive. During the hours she spends with him she can almost forget why they’re doing this, even while they’re arguing over the merits of AEDP versus EMDR; the whole thing feels almost impersonal, almost like it’s _just_ work, _just_ study. Sometimes she vanishes down a research rabbit hole and surfaces knowing a whole lot more about art therapy for traumatised children and feeling like she should really get college credit out of it.

There’s a woman in Buenos Aires Nile likes, going by some papers she’s published and her talks on YouTube, but Copley’s trying to steer her towards someone based in London, so he’ll be able to monitor/stalk them more easily. He finds a guy based in Kensington who’s multilingual, has the right kind of qualifications, shows up to protests against war and Brexit and police brutality and climate disaster and is serious enough about all of it to get himself arrested a few times. And he’s a passionate privacy advocate.

But on the other hand he’s arguably a little too chatty about what a passionate privacy advocate he is on Twitter.

“The thing is,” Nile says, “You could be the kind of person who’d genuinely rather die than tell the cops and still suck at not telling your sister.”

They watch a short interview the man gave to a local news channel a few years back and Copley sucks his teeth. “Too much ego,” he judges regretfully.

Nile agrees, although as Copley takes the unknowing Dr Scott down from the board, she wonders if someone a little brash mightn’t be good for Andy, provoke her into opening up.

But the same person could make Nicky shut down and just irritate Joe.

Ideally, of course, it wouldn’t be just _one_ person. Ideally, they’d each be able to go in for a session or two, decide if it felt right, and move on to someone else if it didn’t. But after Merrick, after _Quynh,_ there’s no way the group’s going to tolerate more than one additional point of exposure. In the short term at least, she’s only getting one shot at this. And what does she really know of what would work for the others? Does she even know what would work for her?

“It’s getting dark,” Copley says. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like a lift back?”

“It’s 4pm.”

He looks unhappy. “It’s no trouble,” he urges. “I don’t like the idea of you walking all that way alone.”

Nile is about to point out that she’s an _ex-Marine_ and _immortal,_ and then stops herself. “Okay, sure, thanks. But just to the station is fine.” She had been looking forward to the walk.

The respite of feeling almost normal evaporates, as it does whenever the work runs out or when Copley makes another of his little attempts at overt kindness.

Copley thinks she’s been raped. She only said “a traumatic incident” in her initial email, and that’s all she plans to tell him about that night, ever. But she did have to specify early on that they needed someone with experience helping survivors of sexual violence, and well. Copley hasn’t _said_ anything, of course, but he keeps being sorrowfully nice to her, which because he really is British means she’s beginning to develop views on different blends of tea.

It also makes her desperately uncomfortable and she’s going to keep on sucking it up. As long as Copley thinks it’s her that’s one person in Nicky’s life that doesn’t know for a fact it was him, one person he gets to decide to tell or – more likely – not.

But apparently neither of them has a clue how to make conversation in these circumstances, so car rides with Copley are strained to say the least.

“So, take care of yourself,” he says, when he drops her off, radiating awkward compassion.

“You too,” is all that comes into Nile’s head by way of response, and she cringes her way onto the Tube.

* * *

Not that she can deny the man has a point.

The Bermondsey apartment is a disaster. Nile’s heart sinks as soon as she gets in through the door and sees the scattered clothes that have spread out of her bedroom and across the living room, every surface covered with discarded food wrappers and psychology journals and dirty coffee cups. She’s always been neat before this, keeping her space clean and ordered always came easy. She listlessly picks up a sweatshirt or two and throws away an empty Pringles tube, then she decides she’ll deal with the rest tomorrow, and sinks into it, burrows down like something hibernating. Sometimes she’ll go on researching on the couch until two in the morning. Sometimes she passes her evenings just blankly scrolling through her phone with the TV on just to fill the silence, a microwave meal congealing on the coffee table beside her. She’s a good cook, she’d even been having some success persuading the others American cuisine wasn’t a total write-off, but she’s not used to doing it alone so she doesn’t.

She’s never had a whole place to herself before, and this isn’t what she thought she’d do with it. The loneliness set in sooner than she expected, but there’s a comfort to it, somehow. For the first time in her life she can make a mess without bothering anyone. And it’s a crappy way to go about it, but at least the mess makes the place feel more like she has some kind of foothold here, makes her own presence visible the way theirs is to her.

It’s the same bolthole they went to after Merrick, though Booker came inside just long enough to change his clothes and then slunk away into the rain. It’s not one of their homeliest safehouses, not a repository of centuries of their treasures. Nile’d bet most of the basic, beige furniture came with the place. They’d bought it twenty years or so ago, Joe had told her later, but they’d never stayed there more than a couple of months at a time.

Still, they’ve been here enough to haunt her, and Nile goes hunting for their ghosts even though she aches whenever she finds them.

Booker shows mostly in absences: gaps in the bookcase, squares of unfaded paint on the walls. She was too tired to quite get what was going on at the time but she remembers Joe, still in his bloodstained clothes, stalking from room to room taking down pictures and sweeping up leatherbound books, breathing much too fast. Then Nicky came and wrapped his arms around him from behind, and they’d both stood like that for a long moment, motionless, until Nicky led him away into the room Nile’s sleeping in now.

She finds everything wrapped in a plastic bag in the bottom of one of the closets: a couple of framed botanical prints, ivy and lilac, an ancient, delicate copy of something called _Las Soledades_ carefully folded inside a linen shirt, a tiny chased silver case full of rolling tobacco. They hadn’t thrown any of it away after all.

Andy’s there in an almost-abstract watercolour of the shadows of birds crossing a beach. A large ammonite on a windowsill. A silver earring caught in the wicker of the laundry basket. A faint, woody fragrance that Nile tracks to a small, inlaid chest of mysterious lumps of yellow resin, which after a few days of bewilderment she concludes are raw _frankincense._ Every now and then, usually when they’re somewhere unfamiliar and she’s got a room to herself, Andy likes to shut herself up and fill the space around her with strange, rich scents that make Nile imagine chanting priestesses pacing across cedarwood floors in ancient temples. But Andy will insist if you ask that there’s nothing _mystical_ about it, she just likes things to smell nice. The scent clings to Nile’s fingers and for an hour or so whenever she props her cheek on her hand it feels almost like she isn’t alone.

Joe and Nicky have left the most traces. The books that remain on the shelves – Neruda, Rumi, Foscolo, Blake – mostly dog-eared paperbacks; neither of them has any of the reverence for the physical form of books that Booker clearly had _._ Surely it was Joe to choose the large, jewel-bright bowls in which Nile has yet to deposit any fruit, the panel of intricate turquoise tiles hanging beside a colourful Bauhaus print. Nile doesn’t touch anything in the kitchen but the microwave and the cutlery and – not often enough – the dishwasher, but she looks at the pair of very solid, wickedly sharp knives ( _“you never need more than two_ ”) and the whetstone and the cast-iron skillet, and _knows_ who put them there. Sometimes she huddles under the soft, sage-green merino blanket she’s sure Nicky left draped over the couch. The Doré print from the Divine Comedy in the bedroom is his, too, she’s certain of it: two figures in the sky, standing together on a swell of cloud, gazing into a vortex of swirling wings and light.

Every time Nile opens her eyes and looks at it she thinks of him. She thinks how has no idea whether she’s helping him or just _hiding_ from him. She thinks how she doesn’t know what she would have done if she had woken up sooner.

 _We’ll take care of him,_ she said, in that room. And she’s ruled out so many people because she picked up non-Nicky-compatible vibes, or thought she did, but the fact remains that Nicky doesn’t actually want to talk to anyone. 

He knows, at least in outline, what she’s doing with Copley. She knows any conversation about it involving him is … indefinitely postponed.

He isn’t trying to stop her, but he’s clearly not happy about it, and she’s doing it anyway.

The last thing he said to her at the airport was: “Do what you think is right.” Which isn’t as abnormal a send-off coming from Nicky as it would be from most people.

But she isn’t doing that, because it’s been weeks, and then nearly a month, and then more than a month and she hasn’t said or written a word to him beyond the proxy greetings they’ve exchanged through Andy. She hasn’t talked to Joe, either, but it must be obvious to everyone that he’s collateral damage here. But every text she starts to write reads to her like _hey, remember when you were gang raped? Remember when it was because of me?_ What if he’s _just_ managed to put it out of his mind for a while, and that’s exactly when her message comes blundering in, bull into china shop? It’s dumb, it’s pathetic, she’s being _awful_ to him and she never would have thought she was such a fucking coward. But she cannot get the idea out of her head, she actually gets kind of shaky whenever she picks up the phone and tells herself to just talk to her _friend._

“He’s doing fine,” Andy says, when pressed.

Nile tries and tries to picture that. “He can’t be,” she says flatly, in the end.

“I didn’t say he _was_ fine, he isn’t. But he knows that, and he’s handling it. And we’re here.”

That’s a reassurance rather than a reproach, but it still hurts.

He hasn’t contacted her either, of course, but he’s – he’s already done more than enough for her. He’s got to be busy just _healing,_ to whatever extent that’s even happening _._ She’s the one who should be fixing this.

If it can even be fixed.

In her saner moments she knows she’s catastrophising. He loves her; Joe said so, and Jesus, didn’t he prove as much? Worst case scenario she ends up going to therapy and no one else does, that’s not something they can’t come back from.

Well. Worst case scenario, the therapist sells them out to Merrick 2.0 or the CIA or the FSB or whoever and they all get imprisoned/tortured/enslaved for centuries.

But the work she’s doing with Copley should make that unlikely. The point is even if Nicky’s upset with her, he’ll forgive her. 

“He sends his love,” Andy tells her, sounding exasperated, and now she has no excuse at all, not that she had one in the first place.

Now it’s been so long, now she’s going to have to start with “ _Sorry I –”_ and then what? What’s the explanation? And what comes after? Over and over she keeps thinking it: there _aren’t words_ for this.

* * *

OK, she’s going to go crazy if she doesn’t _stop_ thinking about it, at least for a few hours.

It’s a Friday night in an exciting foreign city. She has options. Festering in the apartment isn’t helping anyone.

Nile does a little Googling, braids her hair, puts on some earrings, and heads into Brixton.

She’s never been to a club on her own before. She’s never downed three shots before even heading onto the dancefloor. But she’s not going to make it there tonight without a little help. There are a lot of edges to take off.

When she’s buzzed enough, Nile hurls herself into the music. She dances like someone who loves dancing, someone who doesn't give a shit about coming here alone, someone who has thought about precisely nothing but dancing all week. For tonight that’s who she’s going to be.

Some guy comes up behind her and grinds against her and Nile punches him before she’s even registered what’s going on.

Someone yells something, there might be a _bitch_ in there somewhere, but it’s hard to be sure over the music. Nile stands there, blinking. Then a quartet of girls come to the rescue, surround her, absorb her, and she says she’s okay, and it’s only when she’s dancing with them her body starts to ring with shock and fury.

How _dare_ he?

_I know what she needs._

No. No, she’s taking the _night off,_ dammit.

She goes to the bathroom, manages to get her breathing to slow down, and can’t find the girls again after. So she has another drink, and dances even harder.

She used to have dreams of flying where she’d be soaring above the rooftops but then she’d find herself unwillingly drifting down to earth, and she’d take off again but it would get harder and harder, she’d have to clench her teeth and her fists and will herself upwards, over and over –

It’s like that.

Then there’s another guy. Short locs, dimples. He’s cute. Okay-looking, anyway. He dances along with her, smiling, and takes his time about moving in closer. Something tightens in her throat and she ignores it and dances closer too.

He kisses her and she is determined to enjoy it and she does. He puts his hands on her hips and his pelvis butts against hers and it feels _nice/weird/gross/nice_ but she figures maybe she can just lean really hard into the nice part of it. She’s young and free and literally immortal and she’s never had a one night stand, so when he yells in her ear about getting out of there, she thinks, _fuck it._

_Nile Freeman, what in the holy hell do you think you’re doing,_ her mom screams in the back of her brain as they walk to the Tube. But she can’t get murdered and she’s never going to see her mom again, she has to be entitled to one drunken dumb decision.

They make out a little more while they’re waiting for the train. It feels ...

It feels okay.

She gets as far as Warren Street with him before it hits her that the reason she’s never had a one night stand is because she doesn’t actually want one, and also that the idea of being shut in somewhere with a strange guy who’s expecting to have sex with her is currently terrifying. She babbles something, _“I can’t_ ,” and lurches off the train and into a sobbing meltdown on the platform.

At least it’s 2am on a Friday night and drunk and weepy is not a particularly out-of-place look on the London Underground. She can’t stop crying, but she flatters herself she’s got it down to fairly discreet levels by the time she stumbles onto a train heading back south.

A redhead in a tiny skirt and a bizarre canary-yellow coat, fluffy like she’s skinned a muppet, plops into the seat next to her, drapes an arm around her shoulders and demands, “Babe, what happened?”

She has little jewels glued under large, unfocused eyes, and a canned cocktail in one hand. She is several more sheets to the wind than even Nile is.

It doesn’t seem to occur to her that Nile might not want to talk to a stranger, and so it doesn’t occur to Nile either. “Well, I just ran out on a guy –“

“Fuck him,” the girl interrupts loudly, raising her drink to the carriage in a vaguely regal salute. “Good choices on the Victoria Line!”

Nile buries her face in her hands. “I’m a shitty friend.”

“No, no, no, you’re not, you’re a bloody amazing friend.”

“You don’t know me, you don’t know that.”

“I can see auras,” announces the girl, and blinks lopsidedly. “I think. I can see them tonight, anyway.”

Nile is appalled to discover that she must be a lot drunker than she even thought as she hears herself reply, “Really? I’m immortal.”

“Cool,” says the stranger, and offers Nile a swig of her drink, which is unsanitary, but it’s not like Nile has to worry about germs any more. “So why are you crying?”

There doesn’t seem any point in holding back now, even if Nile could remember how to do it. “We got in this really bad situation and, and, these guys –” She takes a sip of the canned mojito and sobs. “My friend protected me, and – I would have been raped, but –“

“Jesus. Shit.”

“I wasn’t, but my friend …”

“Fucking _hell._ ” The young woman pulls Nile into a fluffy yellow hug. “Oh, _mate._ What a fucker of a thing, I’m so sorry that happened to you.”

“It _didn’t_ happen to me. It’s not about _me._ ”

“Babe, babe. You were there, right? It was shit, right?”

“Right.”

“So listen, listen. Listen. My cousin had this total creep send messages to her online about fucked-up shit he wanted to do to her and she got PTSD from that and she never even met him. What happened to your friend is about her and what happened to you is about you. _This,_ ” she spills a little of the drink as she gestures, maybe at Nile’s aura, “… _is_ about you.”

“But my friend went through so much worse. They still are going through it, it’s not even really over, you know?” Yeah, apparently she’s decided Nicky’s gender is the most important thing to keep secret here. “And now I’m not there, and I miss them, and I don’t know what to say.”

The girl frowns, thinking about it.

“I don’t think it matters so much what you say,” she muses.

“But I literally can’t – I try and I just – there aren’t any words –“

The girl’s eyes go even wider with some epiphany. “So … maybe that’s the answer.”

“What is?”

The stranger waves her hands towards ineffability. “No _words_.”

Nile tries to figure out if that’s somehow profound or just really stupid and gives it up as a lost cause. She smiles wetly.

“So what’s my aura look like?” she asks.

The girl gazes at her. “Golden,” she says.

She wipes a tear from Nile’s face, and it occurs to Nile that if the train ride went on much longer there’s a possibility they might kiss, which maybe wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. But then the train stops at Charing Cross and the girl pecks Nile on the cheek and vanishes into the night like some sort of mythical creature, which in view of what Nile actually is, is kind of ironic.

* * *

The photography thing isn’t planned, obviously.

Nile stumbles back into the apartment just before 3 am, blindly pulls her coat off in the living room, and knocks over a table lamp, which audibly breaks. She teeters on the edge of another breakdown over that and then decides it can wait until morning.

She wakes up still in her clothes with a headache that vanishes with undeserved speed as soon as she drinks a pint of water, and yeah, the lamp is still broken. But on the other hand, it’s a pretty ugly lamp and she can’t even flagellate herself into believing she’s just wrecked somebody’s pride and joy. Looking around, she decides that actually, even aside from the mess she’s made, the apartment is really kind of … depressing. Not the art and the books and the blanket, of course, but the basic décor was probably fine twenty years ago, and clearly hasn’t been touched since then. She’s not going to redecorate the entire place without even checking in with the others. But it wouldn’t hurt to freshen it up a little.

She ends up in Hackney where she buys a pleasingly geometric lamp made with copper and smoked glass, a round mirror, and some cushion covers with bright mid-century patterns. Then she gets a little lost as she’s lugging it all back to the tube station, and the pleasure of her purchases begins to fade. The lamp and the mirror are heavy and her arms hurt, and she’s starting to ruminate again about Nicky and what the hell she’s doing in London and _what she would have done_ …

And then there’s the tree.

Nile stops, puts everything down on the sidewalk, and takes a picture without thinking twice.

It’s a _good_ photo, dammit. The light and shade, the citrus shock of colour. But what’s the point, no one’s going to see it. She thinks of how she was planning on going to art school one day, and how her brother loved the little comic strips she’d doodle for him when he had a bad day at school, and for a moment she feels so lost and so lonely it’s going to kill her, immortality be damned.

The bright yellow makes her think of the girl on the Tube. Nile hadn’t really remembered much of what she’d said, beyond something about auras. But now it comes back.

She does have someone to show the picture to, of course. She was just thinking about him.

She tries to think of a message to add to the photo but she still can’t, so she just hits send. No words.

He replies _Beautiful_ immediately and she feels fresh air fill her lungs as if all these weeks she’s been holding her breath.

And suddenly they have a way to talk.

* * *

She sends him a shot of Tower Bridge against banks of dappled cloud. Kind of a tourist cliché, but she’s got to start somewhere.

He sends back a thumbs up and three hearts and it’s so easily the best thing she’s seen all day that she’s tempted to take a screenshot and send it right back to him.

He sends her amber sunlight filtering through olive trees. She sends him bare oaks like black lace on a peach and silver sky in St James’s Park. He sends her a misty dawn over that silk-smooth sea. She sends him a line of white swans on the Thames. He sends her waterfalls pouring over emerald rocks into a still stretch of green-and-gold water.

She cleans up the apartment, finally, and it doesn’t even take as long as she was expecting. She sends Nicky a bonus shot of the new lamp and the cushions on the couch and he says _That looks great!_ But she heads out to find him something more, because by this point searching London for stuff to photograph for Nicky is basically a part-time job and she is not going to half-ass it. She sends him colourful narrowboats on Regent’s Canal, under falls of red Virginia creeper. 

He sends her a shot of Joe, sitting outside a taverna, two tiny white-and-tortoiseshell kittens scaling him like a jungle gym. One already stands, triumphant, on his shoulder. As any right-thinking person would be in this situation, Joe is beaming.

 _Oh that’s cheating,_ she replies.

Mercilessly, Nicky fires back an image of one of the kittens asleep in Joe’s cupped hands and Nile moans aloud.

The next day she starts scouring London early. She retaliates with three ducks sleeping cuddled together on the grass in Greenwich Park, and adds _It’s noon! So lazy!_

Joe starts showing up more after that, which is unsurprising given that it’s Nicky and the implied name of the game is _Beautiful Things I Saw Today_. Joe framed in an archway of gold stone. Joe reading on the end of a wooden pier, half-silhouetted in sunlight. Joe sketching: no photos of Andy, of course, but Nile still gets to see her, held in pencil lines, over Joe’s shoulder.

Tentatively, she takes a selfie under a plane tree, by a fancy cast-iron lamppost on Victoria Embankment. _Lovely. It’s good to see you,_ he says, with a serving of hearts and stars for good measure. So she asks _I’d like to see you, too. Send me one of you both?_ But that’s the only message he ignores.

She sends him a sunset cityscape from the top of Primrose Hill. She sends him a fox, large and copper-furred and gorgeous, spotlit under a streetlight just yards from what’s starting to feel like _her_ front door. She sends him a moody shot of St Pancras clocktower in the rain.

He usually just replies with a few words of praise and a volley of emojis, before sending a picture of his own. It’s a strange, sweet thing that a man who’s so measured and dignified in his speech is wildly extravagant when it comes to smileys.

This time, though, he has more to say.

_Beautiful picture but it looks cold. Is that St Pancras? Are you still there?_

She types back, _Just got home, why?_

_I’m glad you’re in the warm. If you’re there again, if The Great Nepalese is still on Eversholt Street you should go. You’d love it._

Nile smiles at the phone, touched. She fell a little bit in love with momo and choyola when they were in Kathmandu, she didn’t know he remembered.

She’s just processing that this is also the most words he’s addressed to her at once since she left when he adds:

_Are you eating properly?_

She feels like either laughing or crying with sheer affection. She’s about to write back _sure_ to cover both points, maybe she’ll tease him a little, maybe she’ll call him _grandma._ But then she thinks about it.

She _isn’t_ eating properly, not at all. Yesterday’s lunch was a bag of chips and a candy bar, and today’s was some kind of instant noodle. It’s not like there’s genuinely no time between reading psychology papers and writing notes for Copley and going photo-hunting. Not like she can’t afford real food. She knows what she’s doing, really. The breakout on her forehead is self-inflicted and she can’t even truly say it wasn’t intentional.

And she doesn’t want to burden him with any of that. But he asked. And maybe he wouldn’t have if he didn’t know he was ready to hear the answer. He wouldn’t want her to lie to him, and she doesn’t want _him_ to feel like he has to lie to her.

So …

_To be honest, I’ve been living off junk. I know, I know. I feel weird cooking when it’s just me._

She can see he starts typing back immediately, though it takes him a while to finish:

_Cooking is more rewarding when the food can be shared, yes, but you always deserve to eat well. The time spent is worthwhile regardless of anyone else’s presence._

Nile pets a fold of the soft green blanket, a little helplessly. Two thousand miles and two time zones away, and after all he’s been through, and he’s still trying to feed her.

She googles The Great Nepalese. It’s still there.

_Okay. I’ll get groceries tonight and I’ll go to the restaurant, I promise. It looks great._

_Are YOU eating right_?

A couple of minutes pass. Nile grips the phone. Even in the absence of typing dots, she swears she can sense he hasn’t gone anywhere, that he’s still there with her, hesitating.

Then he answers.

 _Yes, but sometimes it’s hard._

Pain blossoms in her chest, but it’s a warm pang. It doesn’t make her panic; it doesn’t feel wrong for it to be there.

_Hard how?_

Nicky pauses again.

_I don’t get hungry. Or I do, but eating still feels wrong somehow._

Another message flashes through before she can react:

_I get like this sometimes. It used to be a problem but it’s much easier to handle now._

And then another:

_Don’t worry._

And he garnishes that with, like, every positive emoji he can get his hands on.

Nile has to wipe her eyes, but she’s still smiling at the screen.

 _I’m not worried like I think you’ll never get through it or you’ll starve to death –_ she wonders what happens if they get to that point and hopes she never finds out -- _But it sounds like it sucks and I’m sorry you’re going through that._

She adds a few hearts. And – screw it – the hug emoji, even though it’s a stupid-looking thing that looks nothing like a hug. She’s never been a very emoji person, she went through a snooty phase about them in ninth grade and didn’t wholly get over it. But if Nicky likes them, he should get them. And maybe they’re starting to rub off on her.

_Thank you._

_Please cook something tonight._

She buys eggs and peppers and canned tomatoes and makes shakshuka since it’s quick and nutritious and they’ve made it together a couple of times. Also it looks pretty in Nicky’s skillet when she sends him photographic proof that she’s kept her word. She’s rewarded with a shower of approving emojis and he says _I could make that for breakfast tomorrow._

And yeah, she feels better after eating it, too. She feels better for running all over London taking photographs. It’s not even just that it connects her to Nicky, to the others, although of course it’s mainly that. The world no longer feels the size of that cramped boiler room. There’s more in it than screams and awful laughter and gunfire ringing through a half-open door.

 _I’m making you chili when I see you,_ she tells him.

_I can’t wait_

She knew, of course. She _knew,_ but still a long breath flows out of her at the easy, warm confirmation that they’re going to see each other again, that it won’t be long _._

She’s been catching up with her language practice online, trying to make up for the weeks where she couldn’t bear to do it. “tvb” she adds impulsively.

 _?_ he replies.

_Forza, Nicky, sei tu l’italiano qui._

_Oh! Allora tvb anch’io_

* * *

“It needs to be somebody good,” she tells Copley, over Lapsang Souchong.

“Well, I thought that was a given –“

Nile looks past the blank paint of the wall, to the tapestry of photographs and notes that used to be there. “Not ‘good at what they _do._ ’ Someone _good._ ”

* * *

The next day she gets a photo from Joe. It’s a shot of a page from his sketchbook: the drawing isn’t one of his delicate, detailed portraits, Nicky’s captured in quick, loose lines – almost a cartoon. But he’s instantly recognisable and his expression is as vivid as if he’s in the room with her. He’s sitting cross-legged on a couch, or maybe on the bed, looking down at his phone, which is emitting a pencilled BING. He's smiling.

Joe says: _Thank you._

_\--_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tvb = ti voglio bene = I love you (platonic, usually)  
> So, basically:
> 
> Nile: ily  
> Nicky (who wasn’t alerted they were talking Italian all of a sudden): ?  
> Nile: Come on, Nicky, you’re the Italian here.  
> Nicky: Oh! Then ily too.
> 
> Me: So for the purposes of this fic I’m going to headcanon Nile as straight.  
> Drunk Redhead Tube Fairy, crashing into the narrative uninvited: No, babe, no.
> 
> [Nicky's Doré.](https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Dore_Par31_rose.jpg)
> 
> I swear a good part of the delay on this chapter was just researching shit to put in the team’s flat. I don’t know why, except that it’s ME, I decided to go for the hardest option, but if it was beloved treasures they’d assembled over centuries it would have been so much easier. But stuff that reflects 100s of years of experience, but was probably mostly acquired fairly casually in the last 20 years was so fucking hard. I even decided on [Andy's taste in music](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-99VOCqTcU), but I couldn’t work it in. And anyway, once it was done, then I had to trawl Instagram and oh, [everywhere else](http://www.victorianweb.org/art/design/castiron/2.html), for inspiration for photos in both London and the Pelion area.  
>    
> God, remember when we used to go to restaurants? And explore cities? Madness. Anyway, I hope a little vicarious travel was as satisfying if wistful for you as It was for me. [The Great Nepalese](https://www.great-nepalese.com/story) is real, est.1982, and I have never been there, but I bet it’s amazing and I wish I was there right now.
> 
> If you come across a non-anon fic in the next ... few days? Week? Which features sending photos to Nicky and is oddly preoccupied with the décor of a Bermondsey flat, that might not be a coincidence.


End file.
